Idle
by PathosInitiative
Summary: Soldiers out of battle and dress.
1. Psychological Evaluation Still Pending

The neat cut that ran straight down the center of face was cast into an ugly light beneath the cold, white light of the infirmary. An ugly grimace and impatient noise issued from deep within his withered throat and at last, fed up with the doctor's pointless silence following yet another pointless question, he said simply, "It is a matter of course. I do what needs to be done, so who cares how much fun I have along the way?" He gestures meaningfully to the sky with a scarred arm, "What I do out there is my own business. I have no idea why you continue to think what I do is 'behavior that warrants further investigation into potential breaks from reality and potentially breaks from Code.' A section 8, is what they were once called. A very long time ago. You're read the codices. And you should know this, my business is mine alone, and whatever the superiors have to say about my methods can stay behind closed doors."

The doctor frowned and marked off a box in a feeble sort of way. He hadn't changed. He was as stubborn as he had always been. It had gone beyond skirting past truth. He had fully ceased to acknowledge it's existence. "Des..." The withered man before him snarled at the name. "That is what the record says and so it is what I will call you, Des. I refuse to indulge you." His patient threw his hands up in exasperation and made to leave his chair. "Des! You will stay until the review is completed or so help me I will force you." A scoff and slight shuffle in his seat was his reply. "Breaks in procedure: None. Breaks in the concept of ally and foe: sixty seven. Enemies slain in open, direct combat: Four. Enemies slain via assassination and execution-style killings: eighty-three."

Des almost smirked. At the very least, his lined face lightened. "Breaks in the concept of friend and ally? I don't fire on fellow operatives."

"But you put them in needlessly dangerous situations. You seem to revel in the ensuing chaos."

"Revel? Needlessly? What the hell are you talking about? They're just as much a tool as I am. They're never in any real danger. They can all handle themselves. Besides, I'm sure you're precious records continue to fail to note how many times I've put enemies into delightfully compromising situations."

"Be that as it may..."

Des cut him off by standing and waving a hand at him in dismissal. "I'm leaving. I follow procedure."

"You skirt it's boundaries every day!"

"Have you read about who Loki was? Let me correct myself actually. Have you read about who Loki IS?"

The doctor's rebuttal was cut out by the sound of hydraulics opening and closing the door to the infirmary.


	2. Retirement

"It's not quite so bad," mused Sirena. She coughed politely into a handkerchief and looked away from the video feeds showing a team of Tenno at work in Phobos. "This sort of "soft" retirement." She smiles at a series of explosions that light up the feeds. "For all my capabilities I've found that stealth is not a particularly observed portion of the Tenno code."

"So there's no feelings of regret or resentment towards your general state of underuse?" asked the evaluator. "None at all?"

She smiled at him and shrugged. "When I'm at last needed I'll be more than ready to respond. For now..." she reached for her steaming cup of tea and lifted it to her lips. "I am more than content."

The evaluator scribbled down a few notes and then asked offhandedly, "Did you enjoy your fieldwork?"

She looked over her cup at him and raised a delicate eyebrow. "Enjoy..." She sighed and took another sip from her tea. "I find that to be such an odd question." The delicate tonality of her voice had been replaced with a cold sharpness. "Speak as we will of honor and duty, the Tenno ultimately are a league of highly trained, remarkably efficient killers. Imagine silence, but it is forced upon you, a simple Grineer soldier. You can hardly raise your weapon as your own doom closes in. Your allies seem to be none the wiser and you cannot do the slightest to warn them of death. Then there is a sound, a great and terrible sound that tears you apart at the seams. An entirely new silence is forced upon you, and it will never again be broken."

The evaluator averted his eyes. "I see. But that didn't quite answer my question."

Sirena took another sip from her tea and smiled. "Does it not?"


	3. Waxing

"Are you awake?" asked the nurse quietly. The slumping heap before her stirred lightly. "Sir? Are you well?" It stirred again. "I've been told to awaken you for a briefing. It's the infested; they've taken over a Corpus station that was holding an Orokin artifact of great interest to the Lotus."

The figure at last rose somewhat from it's slouching position. The dull light of the room revealed an emaciated man- his eyes sunken and lined with dark circles. What little hair still grew from his head was thin, wiry and ghost-white. His eyelids peeled back lethargically, revealing intensely bloodshot electric-blue eyes. "In...fested?" He struggled to raised himself in the chair but could only barely do so- an enormous growth, like a turtle shell, but covered in skin, grew over the entirety of his ribcage. It added nearly unbearable weight to his chest, and the dull light began to reveal the array of straps and braces upon his chair- all intent on keeping his form from collapsing like a clam-shell and killing him. The strange mutation upon his chest held the majority of his vital organs, save intestinal tracts. Heart, lung, liver, kidneys, and miscellanea occupied a terribly confined space, bringing upon him only complications. He coughed and raised his head to meet the eyes of the nurse. "Take me to the refitting station."

As the nurse wheeled him to the refitting station, he fell upon an almost comatose sleep yet again. His life had been lived on the brink, placing his trust in the integrity of artificial equipment to keep his misplaced and misshapen heart beating. It was only right, he thought in amusement, that they pair his body to this Frame. A man who was never born, merely cast into the twilight of his last days that seemed paradoxically unending. This man, bereft of any promises of a beautiful sunrise.

He broke from his coma as they laid him upon the refitting table and began to fasten his suit to his withering form. As the mask descended upon him, he almost smiled.


	4. A Fond Memory

"It's a simple matter of doing what is right, not what is easy," he said shortly, "They are words to live by. Words to die by." He shifted his gait somewhat. The cancers that bubbled beneath the thinning veneer of skin twisted and churned to his shifting and with a grimace of pain he redoubled his efforts to focus upon the refitter who continued to repair the microfractures in his suit.

"But to just soldier on? Take all that came to you without a word? The missions, no matter how bad? The Void? Even the cancers that they brought upon you?" replied the refitter. His tone was almost sympathetic in it's softness, coating an underbelly of a poorly masked mixture of reverence and humbling fear. "How could one just bear a weight without a single complaint?"

"To soldier on is exactly what I did. I am a soldier. I do what I am told, and when I am told to shoulder a burden I will do so." He brought a misshapen hand to the side of his neck and massaged it with a wince. "When the offers of discharge – honorable, decorated discharge, came I turned them down. They insisted with each mission. Each new weight and each..." He looked down at a cancerous bicep and then back to the refitter. "No matter. Even when they begged, I had to deny. It is a duty to carry on. This suit let me do so beyond the wildest dreams of any soldier. Ultimate dedication to the Tenno. Ultimate dedication to the very meaning of a Warframe."

He walked idly over to the suit that lay upon the repair bench and put a hand fondly on it's shoulder. "This is why I still fight. The reason. The vehicle. My ideals may drive my mind and soul to fight, but Rhino drives my body. Without it I would have been sentenced to the same quiet life and afterlife of many warriors past. There is nobility in the death of a loyal soldier, and yet..." He looked down at his own body and frowned. "Perhaps I haven't yet come to accept that. So long as Rhino carries me through every fight, so long as it helps me to shoulder this burden then perhaps I won't find myself upon a memorial wall. A fond memory."

He gave the refitter a gruff but friendly pat on the shoulder. "'Remember Rhino?' 'I heard he died in his sleep.' 'Yes. He was a faithful Tenno.'" He chuckled. "Refit that suit well brother. I am not yet ready to welcome those words."


	5. Efficiency

As the refitters strapped him to a harness to begin the process of removing his suit, he could not help but notice how terribly slow they were going about the entire process. One refitter struck idle chat with another as the pieces were taken away from his body, and the dialogue played in slow-motion. Alaku had little interest in whatever it was they were saying-instead he could focus only on the terrifying inefficiencies with which they removed the pieces of his suit. Each motion was analzyed in an instant by him, and each analysis brought up suggestion after suggestion that could be implemented to shave milliseconds to tenths of a second off of the process. His Warframe, like any other was complicated to remove, but the machinery with which they did it left so much to be desired. Both legs could be removed at once as opposed to one at a time, and the fact that refitters had to unseal parts of his helm and torso by hand was grossly inefficient. The whole process, having seen it now more times than he cared to count, had no less than four hundred and seventy-two inefficiencies that could have been- no, should have been corrected by now. With a frown plastered firmly on his features now he moaned, When the last of his suit, the bracers, came away from him he stepped quickly from the harness, undoing it expertly and sweeping himself from the station and mumbling,

One refitter looked to the other and grumbled, His partner shook his head.

The other refitter shrugged and picked up a shoulder plate, examining the electricity that had yet to dissipate still bouncing between the coils upon it.


End file.
